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Saturday, July 29, 2017

Book Review: Say Nothing by Brad Parks

Say Nothing, Brad Parks' first standalone novel outside of the Carter Ross mystery series, is a fast paced, compelling thriller that delivers an unexpected emotional impact. The novel starts with the kidnapping of the twin children of Federal Judge Scott Sampson, a crime orchestrated to force a particular verdict in a particular case. After Sampson performs as requested on a test case, his son is released, but his daughter remains in the hands of the kidnappers, leverage for a ruling on a case involving a pharmaceutical breakthrough. As Sampson and his wife Allison try to maintain a façade of normalcy, they start looking closely at the people around them. No one is above suspicion, not even each other.

Say Nothing is set in southeastern Virginia, in locations ranging from the Middle Peninsula to downtown Norfolk. Parks handles the setting effectively, but never really evokes a sense of the place. The novel isn’t afraid to stretch credibility, sometimes to the breaking point, and like many modern novelist, Parks likes to throw one or two more obstacles into the path of his protagonist than are strictly necessary for the story. He also interrupts a strong first-person narrative with short one-to-two page third-person chapters focusing on the kidnappers, which really don’t add anything substantive. We get all the terror we need from the scenario through the messages and ‘gifts’ sent by the kidnappers. In spite of these minor flaws, Say Nothing offers a well written narrative, compelling characters, and a satisfying resolution. B

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About This Blog

This blog is about narrative, the stories, both fiction and non-fiction, that we tell about our universe and ourselves. What is the genesis of these stories? How and why do we tell them? What do they mean? Topics will cover both the craft of storytelling, mostly regarding written forms such a novels, creative non-fiction and short stories, as well as analysis and critique of narratives through movie, television and book reviews.

About Me

Harboring Secrets

My science fiction short story Meta has been published as part of the Chesapeake Bay Writers Anniversary Anthology, Harboring Secrets: Tales and Reflections from The Chesapeake Bay Writers, available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Four Mile Circus

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying . . . but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice . . . but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks . . . but nobody loved it.

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination

In Alfred Bester's classic 1956 science fiction novel Tiger, Tiger (published for the less than literate masses of North America as The Stars My Destination) protagonist Gully Foyle masquerades as Jeffrey Fourmyle, wealthy buffon who owns and operates a traveling freak show known as the Four Mile Circus. The circus was a prop that allowed Foyle to travel among the social elite as he sought information on the Vorga, a ship that had left him for dead on the wreckage of the spaceship Nomad. Driven by revenge, Foyle would transcend his common origins to alter the course of human history.

The old year soured as pestilence poisoned the planets. The war gained momentum and grew from a distant affair of romantic raids and skirmishes in space to a holocaust in the making. It had become evident that the last of the World Wars was done and the first of the Solar Wars had begun....An ominous foreboding paralyzed every home from Baffin Island to the Falklands. The dying year was enlivened only by the advent of the Four Mile Circus.